"Conjunction" is a fairly broad term that can be used for a variety of elements linking clauses. If you can identify clauses and there is an element between them, you can call it a conjunction. More specifically you can try to determine whether the relationship is coordinate or [/i]subordinate[/i], and then refer to it as a "coordinating conjunction" or "subordinating conjunction".

The Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross 1967) is one test that can be used for coordination: that you cannot extract non-parallel elements from half of what is coordinated:
*What did you drink soda and eat?

However, that doesn't doesn't always work:
Who did you go to class and meet?

And coordinating conjunctions can also coordinate sub-clausal constituents ("mother and father" or "sing and dance"), and there is some debate about whether that is directly related to the same structure as clause coordination.

As for clausal subordination, that's also a complex topic, with various different types of subordination, and also some other approaches to labeling the "conjunctions" (which is a pre-theoretical term), for example calling those that mark complement clauses "complementizers" as in "that": "He said that he was..."

And there are also other more complicated distinctions, such as various hybrid ideas like cosubordination, pseudocoordination, pseudosubordination, para-hypotaxis, etc. (For more details, see: http://linguistforum.com/typology-and-descriptive-linguistics/incoordination-(sentence-initial-counterparts-of-'and')/msg32780/#msg32780)

The point is that this topic is either relatively simple (from a traditional or causal descriptive perspective) or very complicated (trying to get the right precise description or theoretical analysis today).

I'm not sure about "tests" to check for conjunctions per se, but I can imagine some ways to investigate the topic, depending on the circumstances.

Could you give an example of the sort of situation you're thinking about?

I'll just conclude for now by saying that although there has been a lot of research (I'm working on related topics myself), there is no consensus yet on exactly how to deal with clause combining, so some of the "answers" will also depend on your perspective/theory.

I can probably recommend something more specific if you can explain your topic a bit more.

--
Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. MIT Ph.D. dissertation.

Hey everyone! 
So I have this linguistic project where I need to collect Greek/Norwegian data. I'll post my questions on this thread. The questions will be based on phonology, morphology and syntax. It would be great if anyone who's proficient in either language could help

Thanks in Advanceee! 

There's essentially nothing else non-Indo-European in that part of Europe. There are the Finno-Ugric (or Uralic) languages in the east, and also various (different families of) Caucasian languages near Georgia. There are also some Turkic languages but mostly in Asia. So I don't know what else this would be.

I didn't specifically recognize it from the recording.

The only (indeed old) language that is relatively uncontroversially related to Basque is Aquitanian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquitanian_language
It's either the ancestor of or related to the ancestor of Basque. However, it is no longer spoken today, so if he "speaks" it in the sense that I speak English and some people speak Basque today, then that wouldn't make sense as the answer.

So I'm not sure on this one-- it could be that this is some other European language not related to Basque (certainly not uncontroversially related). Whoever said that might be wrong (or basing it on an unaccepted hypothesis of relationship). Note that "old" isn't a very meaningful word for describing languages (unless you actually mean "as spoken thousands of years ago", like Aquitanian, which no one speaks now, at least not exactly like that of course). Just listening to this, it doesn't sound like Basque to me, for the record, but I only have a very limited background in the language.

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